Ideas needed for easy website set-up...

[tuckingfits]

Can anyone point me in the direction of how to set up a simple portfolio type website please?

I am a sahm,I take in ironing to do at night,word is slowly spreading & I am getting more customers slowly. However,my passion lays in landscape photography.

I have registered a domain name & pay a DD to 1&1 but as yet haven't built the website. I seem to have a total mental block & have no idea where or how to start. I don't like the templates & have no clue how to sell myself with a biography type page.

I have sold a few prints in person at sales & was approached via another site I use as a portfolio & successfully sold 4 large prints to an international customer,so there is some kind of a market for my work. I just need to get a website up & running to help me get more exposure (no pun intended!).

I really do need to do this as we are struggling to live day to day & there are no employed jobs in anything locally currently - I am flexible in terms of what I can do - shop work,secretarial,pub,animal care,but there just aren't any jobs.

Does anyone have any experience of building their own website who could spare some time to try & make it seem more accessible to me? I have no idea why i have this huge mental block about it,but it surely can't be as terribly difficult as i am finding it?!

Shameless bump for the morning crew!

My mate's husband uses blogger - he has customised the templates to suit his needs/requirements. He's a photographer too - and has been known to help with website building. I think he'd probably give you some advice free but if you wanted actual help with building the site, he'd likely want to charge.

I've set up my own blog/site on wordpress without too much difficulty, but I'm just using that to ramble on, and not to showcase anything.

If you want the contact details for the friends' H's website, PM me. :)

Try Wordpress

Start by setting up a Facebook business page. It's really, really easy to do. I know a few photographers who have pages on there and it's a great, free way to network and show your portfolio to potential customers.

If you want a free website, Weebly is supposed to be good. It's all drag and drop and you can set up ecommerce to sell work too. A basic site is free and extra features are less than £4 per month.

You could also submit your images to image sites like 123RF, Getty etc. Then you'll get commission when anybody pays to use them.

Wordpress. Wordpress. Wordpress

Wordpress is the best option. Its the most straightforward to use for what you are trying to achieve

Ah great,thank you all! So I'll have a look at WordPress then! I've got a Facebook business page for both ventures,so that's one thing I've done right!

A rare sunny day here so I'm going to do some tidying in the garden but over the next couple of nights I shall investigate all your suggestions. Very grateful to you all & I may drop issimma a pm at some stage! NGV - I'd feel a bit funny approaching your friend's husband for free advice! But if needs must,I shall :)

I set up my storytelling website from a publisher template, it's working quite well for me.
My sister set me up a Wordpress site as well, it's more intuitive to use, but less pretty. I may keep both.

Hi tuckingfits. I have just moved to another webhost and I'm using 000webhost. I read some articles and a very good one told me what to look for, though I can't remember what they were (too technical) and this has all of it. you can start off with a good free website and it's only $4 and something for the upgraded package. I'm very pleased with it and it has a simple website builder with great templates.

My advice on building the site and content is, start off simple. Just get yourself a decent looking template to start and throw some simple text up introducing your work. Then you can go back and polish and improve it as you go along.

Anyone have any advice on setting my websites up so mobiles get directed to the Wordpress site from the main site? I can add a link, but would like a way to detect and redirect customers.

InMySpareTime - I'm no website techie, but off the top of my head what you've got there is a fairly complicated "ask" - your site would need to interact with the browser and make a decision based upon the information fed back to your website based upon that and make "best assumption". So this isn't just a case of a one line piece of HTML.

What's your business reason for wanting to send different browsers/devices to different websites? Is it a "viewing" one? If yes, then rather than you employ someone to write/adapt a complicated piece of code, you may be better off using a (wordpress ?) theme with adaptive framework which means it will best re-size and display your page depending on the device and browser in question.

Browser detection and redirection is not a very complicated bit of code but it's not the right solution either - you want to use a modern theme for WordPress that works well on all devices rather than build two different sites. As you want a portfolio site you are looking for a "wordpress responsive portfolio theme". If you are using WordPress.com there is probably one available there, or if you are hosting your own WordPress (not as daunting as it sounds if you have time on your hands) google it or if you can afford to pay a little go to themeforest, elegantthemes and woothemes and take your pick.

For selling digital art also consider shutterstock and perhaps istockphoto, also maybe deviantart (it's not all deviant ).

DH's website is on 1and1 and it most certainly comes up on UK only searches

a REALLY important thing is to have your own domain name
and uses the POP email accounts on it

businesses who use hotmail accounts just scream cheesy to me

mine is written on coffeecup - cost about £45 - pays my mortgage :-)

I'm pretty searchable already, putting in my business name, I'm the first 3 results.
I need to work on my key word searchability, as I'm nowhere to be found on storyteller.
I was quite encouraged at a network meeting that someone remembered my business name but not my real name, at least it's catchy!

putting in your business name is NOT what people do though ....

my google check is on DHs name and I discount all hits on our own site
he is currently the top three pages : other people talking about him

if you are a storyteller you need to check the content of your pages so that your business name, your name and storyteller appear LOTS

My business name has "story" in already (Short Story Lady), I need to get "Storyteller" and my name in more though.

I googled my name and "story", I was the first 4, the 6th and the 7th hit. Not bad at all!

I think the cheapest and simplest way is to have a facebook business page. It also helps to joing as many facebook business or mums groups to get the word out.
I agree that wordpress is easy to use as well.

To make your page come up in the search rankings you need to plan the content carefully and update it regularly. Using Google Adwords you can find out which keywords are the most popular in google searches.

adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS

The important thing is that your page is written in good clear english and the appriopate key words that you want are used sensibly in the text. It is vital that you are clear what you are selling otherwise you will not make a sale.

I'm a graphic designer and illustrator so looking for similar things out of a site as you. I have a 'main' site (for my design work) which I had built by a web designer but using a Wordpress template with gallery plugin so I can edit it myself and a Wordpress blog, also with gallery plugin for my other work - I did this one myself. Neither are especially flashy but they do what I need for now ie give me a presence on the web and somewhere to point anyone who wants to see my work, and most importantly for a small business or someone just starting up, they didn't cost a fortune to get up and running.

I have had my own websites for the past 6 years and they pay the mortgage - which is always helpful!

One of them is all about 1st birthday party ideas and the link is how I put together the website as I was getting so many emails asking me www.1st-birthday-party-ideas.com/work-at-home-mum.html

Hope it helps! Happy to answer questions either here or if you want to contact me via my site.

Good luck with your business.

Suz